On bilingualism and how real-life practice boosts your language skills

Although the many vocab tests we have every second week in Croatian classes can be stressful and annoying sometimes I'm still glad we have them. If there's something I realized over winter-break it's that languages have to be practiced permanently in order not to forget everything. By that I mean studying grammar and vocabulary as well as to actually use it. And although you of course have to study all the grammar and words in order to be able professionally work witth it, I realized that practice is the most important thing for languages learners. My mother tongue is German and as for now I'm learning three other languages, and while I got to use my other two foreign languages a lot over winter break I found myself making great progress at them even without sitting down and studying. Not so with Croatian. Unfortunately the only chance I had to practice Croatian was a little conversation with my uncle at lunch who spoke a messy mix of Croatian and Slovene. He never learned the languages per se because my family stopped teaching their kids Slovene and Croatian one generation before he was born, something I'm really not happy about because I don't understand how parents can decide not passing their mother tongue on to their kids no matter where they live. Over the years, I've heard the silliest justifications.Wheres the harm in knowing it? It's not even that big of an effort, you just speak it with them, the kids will learn it and as they grow older they will learn to keep their two languages apart. You see there is not reason not to raise your kids bilingual. But this also supports my point about practice being the best way of learning a language. Everything my uncle knows he picked up visiting our relatives in Slovenia, and while he says he can understand what they say, forming whole sentences is difficult, but that's how it is, understanding is easier than talking. Another maybe not so smart thing was that I did most of the tons of homework we got in the beginning at once so I would have my peace the rest of the break. What I'm trying to say with this post is that if you are learning a language, try to apply it in your everyday life as much as you can. I could literally feel my English and Albanian improve as I was talking/texting in those languages while I had a somewhat bad conscious about neglecting Croatian over this time. And another thing is that if you have the possibility, raise you kids bilingual, there is no advantage in withholding the gift of effortless learning a second language Even if it's a language that's only spoken by a few people, there is no harm in knowing it. In the End you can really say “use it or lose it” is something that definitely applies for language learning.

Why getting to Cuba is so hard

Havana

With term break around the corner ( although it's still winter break) a friend of mine and I have been thinking of traveling for a month since we will be off for the whole February.

The problem is our tastes concerning the destinations are not really the same. He prefers Asia while I like going to the US. Then we came up with South and middle America. He said he wanted to go for some time now but didn't speak any Spanish. Well I had two years of Spanish in school, but out of the five languages I “speak” I'm the worst at this one.. frankly I wouldn't even consider myself speaking that language although I was a straight A Spanish student in school. But whatever I'm sure you can cope there even without being a Spanish expert. So finally we ended up checking flights to the following destinations: Bolivia,Peru and Cuba.

While flights to Bolivia and Peru were found quickly, even if a little more expensive than we thought we couldn't find any to Cuba.

Every time I entered Havana or Varandero the search engine wouldn't recognize it.

I found this quite strange so I started to do a little research on the internet later when I got home. I thought maybe it was the smart phone and tried again on the computer, but still nothing. After googling for flights instead of looking for some directly on travel sites I found one airline flying into Havana.. yes only one.

I wanted to know why that is, I mean I know Cuba is quite isolated but since even grocery stores like Hofer offer trips there I thought they had quite the tourism. So I googled again and found some interesting things. While the lack of flights from Europe is explained by Cuba not really being a point of interest the one from the US had other reasons. While I had already heard that it was somewhat hard for US-citizens to go to Cuba I found out it was even more than that.

In 1960 President Eisenhower placed an Embargo against Cuba after the Cuban government had disowned Americans and American companies there for about a billion dollars. From there on it was prohibited to export any goods to Cuba except for medicine or food. Financial support of the regime in Havana was prohibited in any way and Bill Clinton even expanded the embargo by disallowing foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba. What Clinton allowed though was the export of other American

products.

Now this Embargo also effects normal US citizens who want to travel there. While Cuba does not mind them coming there they are not allowed to go there by the US. The reason is that if you stay there for longer than a day it is only logic that you are going to spend money and support the government. This the reason you can't go there without a special license. Those license are available for Journalist, people who do academic research, people who do government business or visit their family there.

There are no such rules for Europeans although you should be careful with what you bring with you, for instance you should only bring one laptop, cell-phone and camera. It is prohibited to bring GPS-devices with you although it is tolerated if your cell-phone has GPS, and what I found most funny: You are not allowed to bring air conditioning.

While I found it quite interesting to learn these things I don't think I will be going to South or middle America this February and stick with my plan on going to Greece instead.

Even-though seeing Bolivia or Peru would sure be interesting I feel like I wouldn’t have enough time to plan that trip and I'm not sure I would feel safe there without planning ahead really well. Cuba on the other hand is out for me as for now because flights there are too expensive since I only found one single airline that would go there.